Well yes, for emulation maybe. But 2700x has much better multicore performance if you have any kind of workflow or multitask a lot. Problem is I've never seen an 8700, only the 8700k. I know an 8700k will get you 4k at least 30fps no problem, but I couldn't tell you confidently of the 8700 even though they should technically be within a stones throw in performance

Heck I have a Ryzen 2700x before I had a 1700 and I never had any issue to reach a stable 30fps in 4k in any area of BOTW. In fact i usually are between 52fps and my max refresh rate of 60fps at 4k, but I have a potent GPU backing it. At some point especially with triple core recompiling on you simply
in 4k will hit the gpu bottleneck area before you hit the cpu bottleneck area.

Sure on some Intel configs probably a stable 60fps is reachable but then add the price difference as well and ... it comes down on how much you want to spend, but in my opinion it is better to push the money into
a better gpu than cpu if you have limited budget especially if you also do gaming on non emulated games in 4k (where you basically always will be gpu bottlenecked and your gpu always will be the issue). Now atm I really cannot recommend
an AMD gpu for CEMU for known problems (slow opengl drivers and apparently no vulcan port for cemu yet), and on the other hand NVidia cards are rather expensive. But any cent spent on the gpu is basically 5 cent spent on the CPU side
regarding performance gains once you hit a certain point which is basically in the 6 core processor area on both sides. So on the processor side wait til the CES and check what AMD will have to offer with their 2019 lineup. Given that they
will go for 7nm next year, they might give Intel a run for its money.

The only emulator where I can say you have a real advantage with a high end intel cpu is the RPCS3 and only in a handful of games and only because this emulator use an intel only instruction for thread synchronisation
which is marked as unsave but apparently gives a huge speed boost on a handful of games.

As for gaming laptops forget them unless you want to have heat/performance problems and throw the entire thing out in a couple of years instead of gradually upgrading your stuff and saving money along the way.
Also most of the stuff which is branded gaming nowadays is overpriced shiny junk with as many leds possible, charging premium prices for often really shoddy build quality.

I have been burned with a corsair gaming keyboard which had shoddy keycaps for a really premium price and I have seen alienware tests which exposed similar patterns of gaming junkware for the idiots who want to pay too much.
So be warned.

Also one general word regarding laptops have several problems
a) limited space for heat dissipation
b) they should limit their power draw

This usually ends up in well designed laptops with cutting down on performance and adding fans to the system to even get rid of the reduced heat.
In lesser well designed systems you basically will get really loud fans and a processor/gpu combo which rather quickly will thermal throttle to avoid
permanent damage to the hardware. In the end a laptop gaming or non gaming always is a compromise between form factor and performance and power draw.
Of course manufacturers love that people buy laptops because they earn way more on them, once a laptop breaks down, the customer needs to buy another one.

From this angle also comes the trend of less to zero self servicability and often not even be able to replace the battery (which for sure will break down
after 1000 loading cycles).

With normal pcs there is a high degree of self servicability possible (face it building a pc is not harder than building a lego car most people simply do not know that),
although normal pcs you buy prefabricated usually
have small breaking points like non ATX motherboards or weird power supply connectors to prevent that the customers change too much themselves.
(and often their default configurations are really shoddy)